About Me

Saturday, April 23, 2016

Prince and I: Farewell to The Purple One

When I logged onto my various social media handles on Friday morning
(NZT) I could scarcely believe what I was reading. It had to be a hoax. Some
sick joke. It was April 22nd not April 1st, and hadn't 2016 already been enough
of a cruel mistress to music fans and pop culture fiends? Apparently not.
Prince was dead. At just 57 years of age.

I wasn’t a fan of everything Prince did. His output was always a bit hit
and miss for me, and I’ll admit that I’m unfamiliar with all but his most
recent of post-2000 work. But the Prince stuff I did like, I absolutely loved,
even if it wasn’t always the most obvious stuff. For example, I never quite got
the whole Purple Rain thing, the album and the movie, and for me, many of the
songs from that era felt a little too wannabe-Hendrix, and just wound up being
too Hendrix-lite. Yet for many, that work and that period is what he’ll be best
remembered for. I get that. And I get that he was a sensational guitarist in
his own right. Apologies, Prince, it wasn’t you, it was me.

That said, there was a lot to love, and like Bowie before him, Prince
was one of those artists who was omnipresent throughout my lifetime. He was
everywhere, sound-tracking everything, for better and for worse. That’s why
people mourn. We didn’t know the man personally, we’re not family, but we
grieve because he takes a little bit of each of us, snippets of our past, with
him. Or rather, we’ve taken bits of Prince (songs, albums, movies) and made
them part of our lives. We mourn the memory of that. The loss of that. That’s
how I see it. How I saw it with Bowie, Michael Jackson before that, and now
with Prince.

Rather than pen some sort of obituary, which I’m ill-equipped to write,
I thought I’d celebrate his life and mark his passing with a short list of five
key Prince moments, as they relate specifically to me and to my life. The
reasons why I consider myself a Prince fan – while not a fan of everything he
did. If you can appreciate the distinction. This is the stuff I loved (and
love). My own most memorable Prince moments, if you will:

I Wanna Be Your Lover

… “I want to be your brother, I want to be your mother and your sister,
too. There ain't no other. That can do the things that I'll do to you” … I was
a mere slip of a schoolboy in late 1979 or early 1980 when Prince burst into my
eardrums with this sublime piece of sleaze-funk. It was everything Michael
Jackson wasn’t. Not wholesome and glossy. It was down and dirty. Sly and
suggestive. Full of exactly the sort of thing that would get any pubescent
schoolboy sniggering covertly. I’m sure I recall an interview I read, around this
time, or perhaps it was a few years later, where Prince talked about being
fascinated by porn. It may have even referred to his Mum’s collection of porn
magazines … yes, his Mum’s collection … and it all just seemed too weird to
even contemplate. Weird, but kind of honest and exciting. Like nobody else was.
‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’ was his first big hit, and his reputation as the
beholder of disco’s dirtiest mind was cemented with the release of the Dirty
Mind (yes!) and Controversy albums in 1980 and 1981. Note that it wasn’t the
things he’d do “for” us, it was the things he’d do “to” us … the dirty
blighter.

Under The Cherry Moon

Everybody raves about Purple Rain. The song, the album, the movie, and
the era. And to be fair, everything Prince touched between 1982 and 1985 turned
to gold. Platinum or triple platinum, even. And Purple Rain garnered Prince an
Oscar for best score. I wasn’t a fan. A couple of years later, Prince won a
Golden Raspberry – the opposite of an Oscar, and yes it is an actual thing –
for his acting and directing of Under The Cherry Moon. It was, from all
accounts, an awful film. Or should I say, from all “other” accounts, because to
this day I still love Under The Cherry Moon. I love its blatant attempt to
rip-off so-called “film noir” sensibilities – it was shot entirely in black and
white, and reeked of all things art deco. I love that it was superficial and
pretentious. For all that critics pan it precisely for those characteristics,
it was exactly as it’s supposed to be. It’s a story of forbidden love and Prince
was wonderful in the lead role as Christopher Tracy. Okay, some of his acting was
ridiculous, but it’s wonderful because he was hilarious rather than occasionally
terrible. None of that is really all that important though – the best thing
about Under The Cherry Moon is that it was sound-tracked by Prince’s 1986 album
Parade, which was, according to me, the second best album he ever made (see
‘Kiss’, ‘Girls And Boys’, and the brilliant slice of sleeper-funk that is
‘Mountains’). I had a cassette copy of Parade in my car for years and it never
let me down as a reliable go-to listen.

Sign O The Times

It’s 1987, and I’m sitting in the lounge of my Rintoul Street
(Wellington, NZ) flat, while my flatmate John, a local club DJ, is introducing
me to his latest batch of brand new vinyl when suddenly, boom! … “in France, a
skinny man died of a big disease with a little name. By chance his girlfriend
came across a needle and soon she did the same. At home there are
seventeen-year-old boys and their idea of fun is being in a gang called 'The
Disciples' high on crack, totin' a machine gun” … right there, dance music
would never be quite the same ever again. One of those “where were you when you
first heard?” moments I still recall three decades later. Like I say, forget
Purple Rain, forget going crazy, crying doves, little red corvettes, raspberry
berets, or partying like it’s 1999. ‘Sign O The Times’ was Prince’s true
masterpiece. As a song and as an album. This was a career highpoint and he’d
gone from faux-Hendrix porn-funker to right-on social commentator in one giant
leap. And of course it helped that the tune’s relatively simple groove struts
along like a particularly cocky free-range rooster on acid. One of the best songs
of its decade, and it almost felt like Prince wasn’t even trying.

Nothing Compares 2 U

I love how Prince used text-speak way before texts were even a thing.
Actually, I’m quite sure there was a lot of stuff he did way before other mere
mortals caught on. But we won’t go into those gory details here. This is a
family blog. Would Sinead O’Connor have been the star she became if he hadn’t
written this break-up masterclass and gifted it to her? I very much doubt it.
There was talent there, for sure, but ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ launched the crazy
baldhead into the global stratosphere (albeit temporarily). I was going through
a particularly dramatic relationship breakdown in late 1989, early 1990, when
this was all the rage, and I came to despise everything about this song. Except
Sinead, who I’d formed a secret relationship with (if only she’d known, huh?).
Which basically means I liked the song so much, I gorged myself on it until I
was utterly heart sick of it. To the extent I couldn’t bear to listen to it
ever again. Gawd, what a lame arse. I can laugh about it now of course (*weak
smile*) and it wasn’t until a few years later that I learned our man had written
it. Suddenly the mist cleared and everything made sense. Prince’s version is
great if not quite as compelling.

Gett Off!

… “Get off, twenty three positions in a one night stand. Get off, I'll
only call you after if you say I can. Get off, let a woman be a woman and a man
be a man (squeal)” … it was the autumn of 1992 and I fancied myself as a
club-night promoter. My closest friend (of the day) and I hired Wellington’s
Reactor nightclub (in Edward Street, above what is now Meow) and planned for a
Sunday night gig. We called the night “Delerium”, and as it turned out, all the
fun was in the weeks of promotion and not the actual event itself. It rained
heavily on the night. We had friends run the door. They had friends who had
names on the door. Hardly anyone paid to get in. The bar staff were our friends
and friends of the clientele. Hardly anyone bought drinks. We had an acoustic
duo (an early version of what would become the hard-rocking Desert Road band)
open the night. Then a performance DJ (DJ Glide) and three or four other DJs.
Then an “exotic dancer” from Brazil. Everyone needed to be paid. My friend and
I lost a lot of money. It was a night I wanted to forget, but the performance
of the exotic dancer – a hunk of a man called Marconi, who later became a male trolley
dolly on a TV show called Sale of the Century – was something I can never really
forget. His performance – like his cladding – was brief, and he danced to
Prince’s ‘Gett Off’ like nobody had ever danced to anything else (ever) … it showcased
Prince at his finest, and sleaze-funk was evidently right back on top (no pun).
And that four-to-five minutes of bittersweet turmoil will always best represent
Nineties’ Prince for me, albeit Prince as interpreted by somebody else’s moves.
As much as I’ve tried to forget. It partially saved an otherwise rather forlorn
night.

And so we come full circle. Prince means many things to many people.
Many different things to many different people. For me, he was a musical genius
who gave me all of the moments listed above. And a whole lot more. He’ll have
touched you (and many others) in completely different ways, obviously, but just
writing this has been a form of catharsis for me. A way of trying to give his
sudden death some kind of context or perspective. I’m lucky to be able to share
these memories with you. Thanks for reading. And thanks Prince, for being there
all the way.